My mum is deeply, deeply a man's woman, a man's muse. Maybe because I'm a kid from the '80s, I'm a bit more dominant. I wanted to be the muse and the director also. I wanted to be the man and the woman.
I've got two cows licks; when I was a kid, all the boys in school used to have curtains, and my hair never used to do that, ever! I always used to try, and I always looked like the geek.
I always call 'Billy Elliot' a fantasy autobiography because I never wanted to be a dancer, but I got a lot of stick from the other kids about wanting to be a writer and being interested in drama.
I used to not stutter any. Oh, I did when I was a kid, I stuttered, I had a bad stutter until I was probably between the second and third grade and a guy got rid of it for me.
As a 13, - 14-year-old kid, I'd sit on my bed with a tape recorder and a newspaper. I would do my own newscast. I would practice my diction.
Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.
I actually made an effort to reject acting, to shove it out of my body, because I didn't want my kids to have an actress as a mother-to have, like, a silly person.
All the things that most kids hated, I loved. I loved that things were asked of me and that, much to my surprise, I was able to do them. I loved the 10 o'clock bedtime. I loved the responsibility.
There are so many kids in this world, and in this country, that need homes. And so we're perfectly content to look into adoption one day, if for some reason we aren't able to have a biological child.
People are starting to refer to 'The Giver' as a classic, but I don't know how that is defined. But if it means that 10, 20, 50 years from now kids will still be reading it, that is kind of awe-inspiring.
I'm going to be like Benjamin Button; I'm just going to grow younger. I will probably be happy, fat, with kids and looking back and thinking, 'I was such a angry young woman.'
I'm really just playing when I write. I feel like I'm a kid again. I want my characters to do and say things like when I played with dolls!
When I was a kid in Michigan, I used to play ball with a town team on Sunday. Of course, I'd go to church first. Played the church organ, as a matter of fact.
Growing up in Hollywood it seemed like every kid was the child of some star. We had no idea that other people would think we were special, because there was no other lifestyle to compare it to.
The footballers' wives I know, they're teachers, midwives. They want to do something useful. One is working at my son's nursery, on her hands and knees, in Converse and jeans, teaching kids to count.
Yes, I want kids. I don't know that I'll ever be ready. But, I'll certainly want them. I'll have them regardless of whether I am ready, I think. I just don't have a timeframe on it yet.
My first Broadway show wasn't until I was a freshman in high school. It was my first trip to New York. I came with a group of theatre kids, and we saw four shows. The very first one was 'Contact.'
When I was a kid, I just devoured TV 24 hours a day. Now that it's actually available 24 hours a day, I'm usually busy doing other stuff. But I do watch TV when I can.
Now we're getting a whole generation of kids who have never had a football team in L.A., so they don't miss it and don't ask for it. It becomes self-perpetuating. They don't know what they're missing.
'Scarface,' I remember going to see that with my father. We didn't know what to expect; we did not know what to expect. I was a kid, and my father took me, and we didn't leave. It was so disturbing, but we loved it.
Don't you just love it when you're disciplining your kids and God whispers, "This is good. I hope you're listening so you can apply this same truth to your life.
